Imagine, if you can, a very specific kind of
anticipation. It's not quite like Christmas morning
and it's definitely not like waiting for an Amazon
package to show up. It's weirder. You're standing
in this brightly lit, almost sterile room. Let's
say it's 1986. You've just gone through a process
that felt more like filing a tax return than,
you know, buying a toaster. Right. There was
a clipboard involved. A wooden clipboard. And
you had to press down really hard. With this
little pencil on carbon paper, you handed cash
to a person, and now you're just standing there
with a bunch of strangers all staring at a wall,
or more specifically, at a hole in the wall.
It sounds like the setup for some dystopian sci
-fi movie, The Waiting Room. It totally does,
doesn't it? But the magic happens. A silver motorized
track, this conveyor belt, it just rumbles to
life. Yeah. And it comes out of the darkness
of that hole. And sliding down these rollers,
bumping against the sides, is a box. And then
another one. And another. And you're just scanning
them, looking for your number, until finally,
yes, there it is. Your Sony Walkman. Or your
blender. Your diamond tennis bracelet. Yes. The
merchandise pickup area. The merchandise pickup
area. That phrase is a time machine for a certain
generation. It really is. If those words trigger
a memory for you, the hum of the motor, the clack
of the rollers, maybe the smell of, like, floor
wax and ozone. Then you know exactly where we're
going today. We are talking about service merchandise.
A name that was once, I mean, absolutely ubiquitous
in American retail. And now it's effectively
a ghost, a memory. But here's the thing. We're
not just here to get nostalgic about conveyor
belts. Although, let's be honest, we are definitely
going to talk a lot more about the conveyor belts.
Of course. We're here to do a deep dive into
the business of service merchandise. Because
when you strip away all that childhood memory,
you're left with a company that was generating
$4 billion in annual sales. $4 billion. And that's
a massive number, especially when you adjust
it for inflation in the context of the time.
This wasn't some quirky mom and pop shop that,
you know, got lucky. This was a titan of retail.
Exactly. And the mission for this deep dive is
to answer what feels like a really confusing
question. How does a company that seemed to have
everything figured out, a huge customer base,
a sophisticated logistics network, and a model
that was weirdly ahead of its time, how does
it just... completely evaporate and not just
evaporate but fail in a way that really makes
you question the entire evolution of retail because
if you look at their model the catalog showroom
it looks well it looks suspiciously like a physical
version of amazon doesn't it it does you browse
a catalog you order from a massive warehouse
and you pick it up you're just using a pencil
instead of a mouse that's the paradox we really
need to unravel they built the infrastructure
for the internet age before the internet even
existed and yet when the internet actually showed
up they died. It's a classic business tragedy,
really. It's about timing, it's about execution,
and it's about the brutal efficiency of what
we now call category killers. So let's get into
it. The rise, the billions, the clipboards, and
the fall of service merchandise. But to understand
how it died, we have to understand how it was
born. And this story doesn't start in a suburban
mall in the 1980s. It starts way, way further
back. Much further back. We need to go all the
way back to the Great Depression. 1934. Right.
Pulaski, Tennessee. This is where we meet the
founders, Harry and Mary Zimmerman. And it's
so crucial to understand that in 1934, the retail
landscape was, I mean, it's just unrecognizable
compared to what we know today. There's no Walmart,
no Target. No Best Buy. Nothing like that. You
had your local general stores, you had big department
stores in the major cities, and you had Five
and Dimes. And that's where the Zimmerman started,
with a Five and Dimes store. And for anyone who
might not know the term, a Five and Dimes is
basically the original dollar store, right? In
spirit, absolutely yes. It's all about high volume,
low margin, small goods. Wool Wolf's was the
giant in that space. Just think about it. Starting
a retail business in 1934, that takes a specific
kind of grit. Oh, the economy is in absolute
shambles. Disposable income is practically non
-existent for most people. So Harry and Mary
are basically learning how to do retail on the
hardest possible difficulty setting. Exactly.
And that experience, I think, it shapes the DNA
of the company for its entire lifespan. They
learn that value, pure, undeniable price competitiveness.
is the only thing that really matters when people
are broke you can't win on customer experience
or luxury during the depression you win on price
period so after the five and dime they eventually
move into the wholesale business and i feel like
wholesale is a term we all know but what did
that actually mean for them back in say The 40s
and 50s. So wholesale is that layer between the
manufacturer and the actual retailer. You're
the middleman. You buy, say, 10 ,000 toasters
from the factory in one giant lot. And then you
sell 10 toasters at a time to a thousand different
small shops. OK, so it's a volume game. Totally
a volume game. The margins are paper thin, but
the volume is enormous. The Zimmermans basically
became experts in logistics in just moving massive
quantities of goods efficiently. But then. Then
we get to the pivot. The moment the timeline
splits and the company we remember is born. 1960.
1960. The year everything changes for them. They
decide to leave the pure wholesale business behind
and try this new hybrid experiment. They open
a store and they call it Service Merchandise,
Inc. And the location here is important, too.
Very important. 309 Broadway, right in downtown
Nashville, Tennessee. This wasn't some new suburban
strip mall. This was a downtown storefront. Correct.
And this is the birth of the catalog showroom.
We really need to pause here and deconstruct
this business model because it is the engine
of their incredible success. But it's also weirdly
the seed of their eventual destruction. It is
such a weird model. I mean, in a normal store,
you walk in, you see the thing you want, you
grab it, you go to the register and you buy it.
Simple. In a catalog showroom, you walk in, you
see a sample of the thing and then you have to
like. fill out a form to ask for the real thing.
Why? Why would you add all that friction to the
shopping process? Well, there are two big reasons.
One is about marketing psychology, and the other
one is about cold, hard economics. And the economic
reason is the most important one, shrinkage.
Shrinkage. The polite retail euphemism for theft.
For theft, absolutely. But also damage, lost
items, administrative errors. But yeah, mostly
theft. In a standard retail environment, think
of a modern department store or even a Best Buy
today. All your inventory is just sitting out
in the open. It's vulnerable. It's incredibly
vulnerable. Anyone with a big coat and, you know,
bad intentions can just walk out with your profit
margins stuffed in their pocket. And service
merchandise is bread and butter. Things like
electronics and jewelry. Those are high value,
small size items. They are perfect for shoplifting.
Exactly. You can fit a lot of diamond rings or
a Walkman in a pocket. By keeping almost all
of your actual inventory in a secure stockroom
behind a big wall, you effectively reduce customer
theft to zero. The only people who can really
steal from you at that point are your own employees.
So the showroom model is basically a fortress
disguised as a store. It's a bank fault for blenders
and VCRs. And that simple fact lets you lower
your insurance costs. It lowers your shrink allowance
in your budget. And you can pass all of those
savings on to the customer in the form of lower
prices. That was the core value proposition.
Okay, that makes total sense. But what about
the marketing psychology part you mentioned?
Right. Because all the inventory was in the back,
it created this feeling that you were buying
wholesale. It felt like you were getting a special
deal that normal retail shoppers couldn't get.
gift like you were in on a secret exactly you
weren't paying for a fancy display or a big beautiful
sales floor you were buying direct from the warehouse
it felt smarter it felt more efficient even the
name service merchandise sounds so utilitarian
it doesn't sound like a fun place to shop it
sounds like a logistics company And that was
part of the charm. It was a signal. It said,
we don't waste money on frills, so you save money.
It was a very powerful message, especially to
the frugal shoppers of that era. Okay, let's
walk through the actual ritual of shopping there.
Because for anyone listening who never experienced
this, it is genuinely hard to describe just how
bureaucratic it all felt. It wasn't really shopping
in the modern sense. It felt more like processing.
It was an administrative task that you performed.
Step one, the tools. You walk in the door, you
don't get a shopping cart, you get a clipboard.
A heavy wooden clipboard and an order form with
carbon paper and a tiny little golf pencil with
no erasure. I want to focus on that clipboard
for a second. Psychologically, what does giving
a customer a clipboard instead of a cart do to
them? It completely changes your mindset. When
you're pushing a shopping cart, you're in a gatherer
mode. You just sort of toss things in. It's passive.
It encourages impulse buys. When you're holding
a clipboard and a pencil, you're in auditor mode.
You're making lists. You're checking numbers.
It makes every single purchase feel more deliberate,
more serious, more official. It kind of kills
the impulse buy, doesn't it? To a huge degree,
yes. You can't just grab a candy bar at the checkout.
You have to find the candy bar in the catalog
and write down its specific five -digit SCUDU
number. That is a lot of friction for a Snickers.
Okay, so you've got your clipboard. Step two
is the browsing. The store wasn't, like, totally
empty. They did have stuff out on display. Right.
That was the showroom part of the name. They'd
have one of every major item, one Sony Walkman
glued to a stand, one toaster chained to a shelf
so you couldn't walk away with it. And it was
usually in working order, right? That was the
claim, yeah. You could press the buttons on the
stereo. You could open the microwave door and
see inside. But you could never take that one
home. That was just the display model. And then
everywhere there were the catalogs. these giant
heavy books on podiums all over the store and
this was a crucial detail because the physical
store might only have room to display say 2 ,000
items, but the warehouse in the back might hold
10 ,000 different products. You could use the
catalog to order things that weren't even in
the room with you. This is the part that just
blows my mind every time I think about it. This
is literally a website. It's a paper website.
You're browsing a database of products, you're
selecting one, and you're initiating a fulfillment
request. They just use paper and pencil instead
of HTML and a mouse click. It is manual e -commerce.
You find the item you want in the book. You find
the code. And you had to be so accurate with
that code. If you wrote down a six instead of
an eight, you were going home with a curling
iron instead of the power drill you wanted. I'm
sure that happened all the time. Okay, so step
three, the order. You filled out your form. You
take your clipboard up to a clerk. The human
interface. The clerk takes your sheet. and types
all those numbers into a computer terminal. And
this was actually a pretty sophisticated part
of the operation for the time. That terminal
was talking to a central server, which was then
talking to a printer back in the stock room.
And you pay before you get the item. That is
such a crucial distinction. In a normal store,
possession happens before payment. You're holding
the item in your hand while you're in line. Here,
you pay your money and all you have is a receipt.
You are putting your trust in the system to deliver
the goods. Which leads us to the grand finale.
Step four, the handover. The conveyor belt. The
climax of the entire visit. You move from the
cashier area over to the merchandise pickup area.
You find your spot along the metal railing. And
you wait. And you know, it's interesting. In
modern retail, wait times are seen as a total
failure of the system. But at Service Merchandise,
the wait was part of the value proposition. It
built anticipation. It was part of the show.
I think you're right. It validated that the item
was fresh from the warehouse. It was coming right
from the back. It hadn't been handled by 100
other customers. It was a pristine box, untouched
by the masses, just for you. But they didn't
stick with just pencils and clerks forever. We
have to talk about silence, Sam. Ah, Silent Sam,
their big, bold attempt to automate the human
interface clerk. This was in the late 80s, so
this is very early tech. Oh, very early. They
put these computer kiosks out on the sales floor.
The idea was that customers would just type in
their own orders. I can only imagine the user
interface on those things. Probably green text
on a black screen, right? Almost certainly. And
think about the demographic at the time. You're
asking people who, for the most part, did not
grow up with computers to interact with a retail
database. It was a bold move. They later rebranded
it to Service Express, but the core idea was
the same. Remove the labor cost of the clerk.
who just types in the data. It is the direct
ancestor of the self -checkout lane and the McDonald's
ordering kiosk. Again, they were just decades
early to the party. They were constantly trying
to solve the friction problem that their own
model created. They knew the clipboard and the
line for the clerk were annoyances. Silent Sam
was the patch they invented. So the model is
working. It's working incredibly well, actually.
Let's get into the golden era. The 1970s and
80s, service merchandise is just exploding across
the country. They are riding two massive cultural
waves at the same time. One is the general suburban
expansion in America, and the other is the mall
boom. And their real estate strategy was so smart,
it wasn't to be in the mall, but to be near the
mall. Exactly. They were often a pad site or
a main anchor in an adjacent strip center. They
let the big, expensive mall generate all the
traffic, and then they would just siphon it off.
The strategy was basically, you just bought some
new clothes at the Gap. Great. Now come across
the street and buy a television and some new
silverware. And the numbers just went wild. This
is where we see that $4 billion a year in sales
figure. To put that in perspective, in the early
1980s, that puts them in the absolute upper echelon
of American retailers. They weren't quite Sears,
but they were a legitimate heavy hitter. And
they started acting like a heavy hitter, too.
They moved their headquarters. Yep. From downtown
Nashville out to the suburbs to Brentwood, Tennessee.
Specifically... the Cool Springs area. For people
who know that area, that's a huge deal. But for
everyone else, what does a move like that signify?
It signifies a major shift from being a scrappy
family business to becoming a corporate empire.
They built a massive sprawling campus. They were
one of the very first big businesses to develop
that area. It showed they had capital to burn
and that they were planning for seemingly infinite
growth. And with that growth came a hunger for
more. they started buying up their competitors.
The acquisition of H .J. Wilson Co. in May of
1985 is the really big one. Wilson's. For around
$200 million. A massive check to write in 1985.
Wilson's was their key to the Sun Belt. It gave
them an instant massive footprint in the South
and the Southwest. And Wilson's was a little
bit different from service merchandise, right?
They sold clothes. They did. Some of their locations
had these huge 15 ,000 square foot off -priced
apparel departments. And this is where you can
start to see the first signs of an identity crisis
creeping in. How so? Well, service merchandise
was known for hard lines, electronics, jewelry,
home goods, things that come in a box. Suddenly,
they're trying to sell sweaters and jeans. Clothes
are a total nightmare for a catalog showroom
model. You need to be able to try them on. You
need all the different sizes. You can't just
order shirt medium from a warehouse and hope
it fits. complicates the logistics significantly.
But they were just so hungry for growth. They
also bought up jewelry chains like Zim's Jewelers
and all these little specialty stores like the
lingerie store and the toy store. And we can't
forget Mr. Howe Warehouse. Which was their attempt
at a home improvement concept. They were trying
to be the Home Depot before the Home Depot completely
took over that space. They were really just throwing
spaghetti at the wall to see what would stick.
But for the general public. The face of the company
wasn't all these acquisitions. It was the game
shows. This was their absolute masterstroke of
marketing in the 80s. Wheel of Fortune. The price
is right. Oh man, I can still hear the announcer's
voice in my head. A fabulous diamond necklace
with a retail value of $3 ,000. Provided by Service
Merchandise. Think about what that does for your
brand. These shows were watched by tens of millions
of people every single day. And they weren't
just showing a logo. They were associating the
products and the store with winning, with luxury,
with the ultimate prize you could take home.
It totally elevated them. Above a place like
Walmart. You don't win a Walmart gift card on
Wheel of Fortune. You win a service merchandise
prize package. Yeah. It sounded so much more
glamorous. It created this prestige halo around
what was, at the end of the day, a discount warehouse
operation. It was truly brilliant marketing.
So they're on top of the world. They're rich.
They're famous. They're everywhere. But, and
there's always but. They weren't blind. They
knew the world was changing. And this brings
us to the whole innovation and experiments part
of their story. Because I think people assume
service merchandise died just because they were
old -fashioned. But they were actually doing
some really wild, forward -thinking stuff. They
were. They were almost desperate to modernize
their own model. And the most fascinating experiment
to me has to be the drive -thru. A drive -thru
for a department store. In the mid -1980s, they
tested this concept at locations near Chicago
and Nashville. How did that even work? You'd
pull up to a window and order a television? Essentially,
yes. You would phone in your order ahead of time
using the catalog numbers, of course. Then you'd
drive to the store, pull into a dedicated lane,
and an employee would bring the box out and load
it into your trunk. Stop me if I'm crazy, but
that is curbside pickup. That is literally the
thing that saved Target and Best Buy during the
pandemic. It is exactly that. They invented it
35 years too early. So why didn't it work? If
it's such a genius idea now... Why was it a flop
back then? A combination of technology and culture,
I think. First, phoning in an order is high friction.
You have to find the number, talk to a human,
read a bunch of long codes, and hope they get
it right. There's no app where you can just tap,
I'm here. Second, the consumer just wasn't trained
for it yet. In the 80s, going shopping was leisure
activity. You wanted to go into the store and
browse. The idea of contactless pickup wasn't
a selling point. It was just plain weird. So
they were solving a problem that people didn't
know they had yet. Precisely. And then, of course,
there's the big one. The Internet. The 90s. The
dot -com boom. And here's the thing a lot of
people forget. Service Merchandise was actually
one of the first major retailers to launch a
functional e -commerce website. Yeah, the source
material says they were generating tens of millions
in sales online pretty early on. In the mid to
late 90s, that is a legitimate, significant revenue
stream. They weren't ignoring the web at all.
They embraced it. And this makes so much sense.
Their entire back end was already set up for
this kind of thing. They had the item codes,
the central warehouses, the shipping logistics.
They were uniquely positioned to be the Amazon
of the 1990s. On paper, they should have won
the whole game. They already had the physical
distribution network that a company like Amazon
had to spend billions to build from scratch.
They had the vendor relationships. They had decades
of brand trust. So why aren't we all ordering
our toilet paper from ServiceMerchandise .com
today? What went wrong? It's a classic case of
the innovator's dilemma. They had a massive legacy
business to protect. They couldn't just pivot
100 % to online because they had hundreds of
these massive, expensive physical stores that
needed to pay rent and salaries. Amazon had no
stores. Amazon could run lean and mean. Service
merchandise was trying to fly a rocket ship while
dragging a 10 -ton anchor behind it. And while
they were busy trying to figure out the internet,
the real sharks were circling in the water. the
category killers the 1990s was just a bloodbath
for general retailers this is the era where the
whole general store concept the idea of selling
a little bit of everything finally died for good
we need to name names here who actually killed
Service merchandise. It wasn't one killer. It
was a gang. In the electronics department, it
was Best Buy and Circuit City. In home goods,
it was Bed Bath and Beyond. In the toy aisle,
it was Toys R Us. And looming over all of it
like a giant shadow was Walmart. Let's take Best
Buy as the prime example. What did Best Buy do
that service merchandise couldn't or wouldn't?
Best Buy introduced what they called the concept
to store format. It was revolutionary at the
time. Big open shelves, no sales clerks hounding
you. No clipboards. You walk in, you see the
VCR you want, you grab the sealed box right off
the shelf and you walk out. It was instant gratification.
Total instant gratification. And from a business
perspective, significantly lower later costs.
They didn't need the guy in the stockroom finding
the box and loading the belt. They didn't need
the clerk at the counter typing in the order.
The customer did all that work for free. So all
that friction. That service merchandise had introduced
the clipboard, the form, the weight. It suddenly
looked incredibly archaic. It wasn't sophisticated
anymore. It was just annoying. Speed became the
new currency in retail. In the 70s, people had
time. In the 90s, with two income households
becoming the norm, everyone was busy. Waiting
15 minutes for a toaster to come down a conveyor
belt suddenly felt like an eternity. And then
there's Walmart. Did Walmart just beat them on
price, plain and simple? Walmart beat them and
everyone else. On supply chain. Walmart's logistics
were so incredibly efficient, their buying power
was so massive that they could often sell a toaster
for less than natural. Service merchandise paid
the manufacturer to buy it. You just can't compete
with that math. So service merchandise is bleeding
market share from all sides. They're losing the
electronics war to Best Buy. They're losing the
price war to Walmart. What do they do? They panic.
Or, in corporate speak, they restructure. 1994.
They bring in a new guy, Gary M. Whitkin, as
president and COO. Right. New blood. He comes
in, looks at the books, and realizes they cannot
win the electronics game anymore. The margins
are just gone. So they make a fateful decision.
They decide to cut off the limb to save the body.
They stopped selling electronics. They drastically
reduced them. They cut out toys almost entirely.
They got rid of sporting goods. But these were
the things that brought people into the store
in the first place. That sounds like corporate
suicide. If you stop selling all the cool stuff,
why would anyone bother to come in? Their logic
was, we can't make any money on TVs anymore because
the margins are too thin, so let's double down
and focus on our high -margin items. Jewelry.
Gifts. Home decor. They tried to turn a utilitarian
warehouse into a fancy jewelry box. Exactly.
But you don't go to a store with a conveyor belt
and a clipboard to buy a high -end engagement
ring. The brand identity was completely at odds
with the new product focus. The vibe was all
wrong. And the stores started to close. They
shed locations left and right. They downsized
the stores that remained open. They were desperately
trying to shrink their way back to profitability.
But in retail, once you start shrinking, it's
almost always a death spiral. Which leads us
to the grim reality of the endgame. 1999. March
15th, 1999. A date that lives in infamy for the
company. They are hit with an involuntary Chapter
11 bankruptcy petition. I want to pause on that
word, involuntary. Because usually a company
files for bankruptcy to protect itself from its
creditors. This was the other way around. This
is a rare and incredibly aggressive move. It
means that the people service merchandise owed
money to the creditors, the vendors, the suppliers.
They all got together and said, we don't trust
you to run this company anymore. We are forcing
you into court to make sure we get what little
is left. Wow. That is the ultimate vote of no
confidence. It's a hostile takeover of the company's
finances. Service Merchandise quickly filed its
own voluntary petition to try and regain some
control of the process. But the writing was on
the wall. The trust between the company and its
suppliers was completely broken. And this was
a massive bankruptcy. It was one of the top 10
largest in the nation at the time. We are talking
about billions and billions of dollars in debt.
And the Zimmerman family. Raymond, the son of
the founders. He finally resigned as chairman
in November of 2000. The family that had built
this retail empire from a single five and dime
in Pulaski, Tennessee, was officially out. So
now it's just lawyers and accountants trying
to salvage the wreckage. They actually make an
attempt to emerge from bankruptcy in 2001. They
did. They had a plan. They were going to be a
much smaller, leaner, jewelry -focused chain.
And, you know, they just might have made it.
But history had other plans. In the summer of
2001, they're getting all their ducks in a row.
They're getting the financing lined up. And then
September 11th happens. And the world just stops.
The economy completely freezes. Consumer confidence
hits rock bottom. For a retailer that was already
in the ICU on life support, this was the equivalent
of the plug being pulled. There was absolutely
no way to raise the capital they needed in that
economic environment. So January 2002? It's officially
over. Liquidation. The end of the line. And the
stock price. Worth less than one cent per share.
It's just staggering to think about. Billions
in value. Decades of history just erased. And
it wasn't just them. This is the key context
that I think people miss. Rendles. Best products?
Sterling Jewelry, McDade's, all of the other
major catalog showrooms died around the exact
same time. So it wasn't just that service merchandise
was badly run in the end. It was an extinction
-level event for the entire species. The retail
environment changed, and that specific organism
couldn't adapt. The catalog showroom model was
an evolutionary dead end. Before we wrap this
all up... I do want to touch on the human side
of this for a moment. Because for all the talk
of stock prices and conveyor belts, this was
a company that actually meant a lot to its community.
Absolutely. And you have to talk about their
work with the Muscular Dystrophy Association.
If you grew up watching the Jerry Lewis telethon
on Labor Day weekend, you saw Raymond Zimmerman.
Every single year, he would come out on stage
with one of those giant checks. Service Merchandise
was one of the MDA's biggest corporate sponsors.
They raised millions upon millions of dollars
through their stores and their customers. It's
just a good reminder that these giant corporations,
they're made of people. And when they collapse,
it's not just a logo that disappears from a building.
It's thousands of jobs. It's millions in charitable
giving. It's a real hole in the community. It
is. Nashville lost a major corporate pillar when
they went under. So here we are. 2002 is long
gone. The old stores have all been turned into
Best Buys or gyms or seasonal Halloween pop -up
shops. But the legacy is... Well, it's complicated.
It really is. I want to go back to that central
irony we touched on at the very beginning. The
big what if. The Amazon tear low. We established
that service merchandise had the warehouses.
They had the catalog system. They had a customer
base that was already trained in the order and
wait mentality. They even had an early functioning
website generating real sales. They had all the
ingredients in the kitchen. So why couldn't they
have just... I don't know, closed the stores
and gone all in on the website. That is the multi
-billion dollar question, isn't it? If they had
been brave enough or maybe just desperate enough
in, say, 1998 to stand up and say, we are closing
every single showroom, we're firing the clerks,
we are keeping the warehouses in the name, we
are now servicemerchandise .com, an online -only
retailer. Could they have actually become Amazon?
They had a huge head start. Amazon was famously
struggling with logistics and profitability in
the late 90s. Service merchandise had mastered
logistics back in the 70s. If they had pivoted
to a pure play e -commerce model using their
existing nationwide supply chain, it's not impossible
to imagine a world where they succeeded. But
they were tied to the real estate, tied to the
old way of doing things. They were in love with
the building. They were in love with the conveyor
belt. And that's the trap so many old companies
fall into. They thought they were in the showroom
business, but they should have realized much
sooner that they were actually in the fulfillment
business. That is a really profound distinction.
Knowing what business you are actually in. It's
the lesson for every legacy company. Kodak thought
they were in the film business, but they were
actually in the memory business. Service merchandise
thought they were in the store business, but
they were really in the logistics business. And
because they clung so tightly to the store. They
ended up losing everything. They protected the
past at the direct expense of the future. That
is a heavy thought to leave this on. The next
time you click buy now on Amazon and you see
that little progress bar on your order moving
from processing to shipping, just take a second
and remember, you are looking at the ghost of
the service merchandise conveyor belt, digitized
and perfected for the 21st century. The belt
never stopped rolling. It just moved to the cloud.